


Sixteen Going On Seventeen

by grav_ity



Series: Before and After [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-26
Updated: 2007-07-26
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:51:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grav_ity/pseuds/grav_ity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginny and Luna talk before, and after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sixteen Going On Seventeen

**Author's Note:**

> AN:I blame sache8 for suggesting getting into Luna Lovegood's head.
> 
> Disclaimer: Not mine, though I did just give them ten years of my life.
> 
> Rating: Kid friendly, no pairing.

****

Sixteen Going On Seventeen

 **Before**

The train was quiet this year. Gryffindor was down two prefects and Ginny never did hear who the Head Girl was, but the Slytherins patrolled the corridors alongside the ugliest witch and wizard she'd ever seen, so there really wasn't much desire for moving once the train pulled out of Kings Cross.

Her anger with Harry had abated somewhat in the weeks between the wedding and September first. Her eyes no longer flashed at mentions of him, her brother or Hermione, but she still nursed a grudge. It hadn't been made any better by her mother's tendancy to throw her out of the room every time the conversation got interesting, but Ginny wasn't raging any more.

The train rumbled along and the food cart never came. Luna sat across from her, reading the Quibbler as always, and didn't say anything as the hours passed. Finally, as Ginny reached up for her robes, Luna folded the magazine away and looked at her with that odd, direct stare she had.

"He couldn't take you with him, you know."

There were two "he-who-must-not-be-named"s now. Voldemort's name brought the Death Eaters down upon your head and saying you knew Harry made it worse.

"I don't see why not." She grouched, thoughts finally put to words. "I'm more useful than Ron."

"But Ron is seventeen," Luna pointed out.

"Yeah, and when he was sixteen he was a blundering idiot as well."

"They can't say his name and they don't know it." Luna said. "They'll have to do magic all the time. If you were with them, you' be as good as wandless. The Trace would have you all caught."

Ginny's heart stopped. They'd been gone so soon after Harry's birthday...

"I hadn't thought of that."

Luna pulled her robes on over her head and straightened her ear rings. The blue tie tucked around her neck shone in the odd light of Hogsmeade station. Ginny's red and yellow just looked a mess of blood.

"We can do magic in the Castle, you know." Luna said it lightly but her face cast in an expression more serious than Ginny had ever seen it. "I imagine there will be a call for it this year."

"That is true." Ginny smiled and meant it for the first time in a month.

"We should talk to Neville then," Luna said, her hand on the compartment door, "It wouldn't make any sense to do three different things at once."

\------

 **After**

Luna slept in Gryffindor tower that night. Padma and Cho were the only Ravenclaw girls to stay, and their families had swallowed them up almost as soon as the fighting was over, but Xenophilius never came. So Luna slept in Parvati's bed and Ginny slept in Lavender's and if Hermione was conspicuously absent, no one mentioned it.

Ginny stared at the bed for a while before getting into it. Lavender Brown had kissed her brother once, and now she was dead. Ginny's own bed, indeed the room Ginny lived in while at Hogwarts, had been destroyed in the fighting as it shared a party wall with the corridor where Tonks had died. There were dead people everywhere at Hogwarts now.

"You know," said Luna in a voice that made Ginny realize she'd been speaking for some time, "In a way I feel jealous of you."

"Why?" Ginny's voice still croaked when she tried to use it. Irrationally, she wished she'd stayed in the Great Hall. Moving bodies and talking to family members was what most of her family was doing now. She'd spent enough time separated from them.

"Your family was here."

They were. And now Fred was gone forever. And her mother was a killer.

"It's never as heroic as it sounds."

"Oh, I know that now." Luna admitted. "But when your father told you to stay in the Room of Requirement, I wished my father had been there to say the same thing to me. I'm sixteen too, after all."

"I snuck out at the first opportunity."

"And I would have gone with you." Luna looked up at the ceiling where Lavender's collection of crystal balls hung from brightly coloured strings and glimmered in the moonlight. "I just meant it would have been nice if someone had remembered."

Ginny looked across the room. Luna was odd but, as Harry had pointed out, she did have an uncanny connection to the truth at the heart of the matter.

"That's why you came up here with me, wasn't it?" she asked. "My mother told you to go to bed."

"Yes." Luna said. "She fought that horrible Bellatrix for us, and then she hugged me and sent me to bed. It was very nice of her."

"Your father will come back, Luna, and then you can go off on all the research trips with him you like."

"Father never treats me like a child. Today was the first day I really wanted to be one."

"When's your birthday?"

"June."

"You come to the Burrow before that then. My mum will mother you to death."

"I think I'd like that."

The crystal balls swung gently from the ceiling and Ginny felt herself falling to sleep in a dead girl's bed thinking that maybe, after all of this, the world would turn out all right.

"You do know that crystal balls are the preferred mating grounds of Nargles? I suspect that tomorrow morning we shall find ourselves covered with their offspring."

Ginny laughed.

+++

 **finis**

**Author's Note:**

> Gravity_Not_Included, July 26, 2007


End file.
